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So much we've never tried, so many adventures to come!

Can’t I Just Have A Home Birth In A Hospital?

I would imagine this is pretty common for first-time moms, but one of the worst parts of being pregnant for me was being terrified of what it would be like to go through labor and delivery. About a week after I found out PJ was coming, a colleague’s wife gave birth to an 11 lb 8 oz baby. Yes, you read that right. He was the cutest little toddler I’ve ever seen all swaddled up, but there was some serious hyperventilating “Oh my God, what have I gotten into here!” on my part when I got that announcement. Every time I freaked out like this, I reminded myself that I had already told my doctors to put it in big red letters on my chart “YES TO DRUGS” and that they were talking up this shiny new hospital where I would be tortured with all the comforts of room service and on-demand entertainment (and drugs. Did I mention the drugs?) So, I scheduled myself and Paul a tour of this high-tech torture chamber at Einstein Medical Center Montgomery.

I won’t dwell on the facilities, which are beautiful, because as it turned out I never got to try a single one of them. I thought I hit the peak of crazy when Organifreak joined our tour group (oh silly, silly pregnant lady).
This girl tested every ounce of filter and control that I possess – she objected to every normal procedure like inserting an IV, state mandated testing of newborns, length of hospital stay, etc and spent a ridiculous amount of time grilling the poor nurse about whether the blankets used in the delivery room – you know, the ones that end up covered in blood and gore and get burned or whatever they do with them – were made with 100% organically grown, pesticide-free cotton because anything else is pure poison. Mind you, she was wearing polyester and if that was her real hair color I will eat one of those non-organic poison blankets.
Anyway, the important thing I gathered in all of Organifreak’s ranting was that the hospital used a shared on-call system. Which would mean you get not just the doctor that is on-call from your practice, but any doctor (or midwife, like the one encouraging Organifreak in this “I really want a homebirth, but in a hospital” craziness) with OB privileges in that hospital. So now I’ve gone from a 1 in 6 chance of getting my doctor, to a 1 in 25 chance. Say what?

When we left the tour, I was pretty worked up. I can see Paul rolling his eyes, and I will apologize now and say that by “worked up,” I mean I was a crying, yelling mess. He had the nerve to suggest that maybe this wasn’t the right hospital for us (it wasn’t) and we should go somewhere else (we did) and that I shouldn’t count on being drugged up because it doesn’t always work out that way (it didn’t). I maaaaay have called him an idiot and insisted that we were sticking with the hospital where I at least had a shot of getting my doctors (nope) and that it was my body being tortured and if I wanted the drugs I was damn well going to get them (nope). Sorry honey 😦

I still have that cute little list of questions I wrote during this tour for my doctor at my next, and it turned out final, prenatal checkup. I keep it to remind myself that parenthood is a journey of the unexpected – even this early in!

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PS – I should clarify before the haterade starts pouring that I object to cake-having-and-eating-too, NOT home births, organic living, etc. All of these things are perfectly legitimate choices to make, BUT when you are choosing to give birth in a hospital there are procedures and rules (and blankets) that are part of the package. And you certainly don’t need to monopolize the time of ten other people making your special arrangements!